The Role of Bodily Expression in Memory Representations of Sadness

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Emotions are expressed by physical expressions such as body posture. Physical cues play a crucial role in recognizing emotional states. We hypothesized that bodily expressions are stored in long-term memory in association with emotion and that such memory representation, knowledge of emotion, enables us to recognize mental states as a certain emotion. The present study focused on sadness as the target emotion and aimed to clarify how bodily expressions are associated with sadness. We decomposed bodily expressions into body-trunk and hand-arm postures and created body-expression photographs by combining these bodily postures. The 44 participants assessed 16 body-expression photographs to evaluate the extent to which they expressed four major emotions (sadness, anger, fear, and happiness), sadness-related body-expression properties (e.g., duration of physical expression), and social situations (e.g., loss of loved one). Sadness was more associated with the two types of body-trunk postures (deep and shallow forward-bent) and the two types of hand-arm postures (overall-face and around-eye). We subsequently classified the bodily expressions based on three kinds of assessment and specified three main groups associated with sadness. Each sadness-related body-expression group was differently associated with body-expression properties and sadness-related situations; for instance, one sadness-related body-expression group was assessed as an activated body-expression property with short-term duration and was associated with failure situations. These findings suggest that nonverbal bodily expressions play a key part in memory representations of sadness in association with body-expression properties and social situations.